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November 22, 1963 chronicles the day of John F. Kennedy's assassination and explores the intersection of stories and memories and how they represent and mythologize that defining moment in history.

November 22, 1963 chronicles the day of John F. Kennedy's assassination and explores the intersection of stories and memories and how they represent and mythologize that defining moment in history. Jackie's story is interwoven with the stories of real people intimately connected with that day: a man who shares cigarettes with Jackie outside the trauma room; a motorcycle policeman flanking the motorcade; Abe Zapruder, who caught the assassination on film; the White House servants waiting for Jackie to return; and the morticians overseeing President Kennedy’s autopsy.

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Review

"Braver's collection is a piercing portrait of those who experienced the Kennedy assassination first-hand." Steve Almond, author of My Life in Heavy Metal

"I had thought that Don DeLillo's Libra was the last fictional word on the JFK assassination, but I was wrong. Like a sublime actor, Adam Braver inhabits these characters, especially Jacqueline Kennedy, in a way that seems brave and heartbroken and true. This is a haunting history play, of private agonies wrenched onto the public stage." April Bernard, author of Swan Electric

"I would never have thought there was a new way to view a moment so thoroughly dissected. Turns out there is. Quite an achievement." Suzanne Kleid, KQED

"November 22, 1963 is more than an intricately imagined microhistory of the primary American trauma of the late 20th century; it's also an affecting portrait of the then First Lady, simultaneously devastated and resilient as she moves from embodying her country's image of someone who controls fortune to someone who's been flattened by it." Jim Shepard, author of Like You'd Understand, Anyway

This extraordinary reconstruction blends fact and imagination with a subtlety that utterly dissolves the line between public and private. It's the intimacy, the closeness we come to these (mostly) well-known protagonists, that is so shocking and moving. Adam Braver has pulled off quite a feat, realigning all our notions and expectations of historical fiction.” Phillip Lopate, author of Waterfront and Portrait of my Body

"Adam Braver has a wonderfully rich imagination and his grasp of historical characters and settings is both deep and natural. I would gladly read anything he writes." Dan Chaon, author of You Remind Me of Me and the National Book Award Finalist Among the Missing

"With a captivating mix of fact and fiction, Braver chronicles the events surrounding JFK’s assassination to moving effect. The event is no stranger to the literary world, but Braver’s recreation, owing to small and often previously off-camera details, remains hauntingly original. Some of these details, like the ones that open the book and dwell on Jackie’s fashion preferences, present a factual backdrop against which later scenese.g., where Jackie refuses to remove her blood-splattered pink suittragically play out. Others, like the way JFK’s eyes keep popping open during the autopsy, underscore the grisly reality of his death. While the accumulation of small moments gives the book its weightiness, the stories of people peripherally associated with the assassination make the book sing; through the experiences of the Texan who sold the government Kennedy’s casket, the mechanic in charge of the limousine in which Kennedy was shot and numerous others, Braver reveals the tragedy of a national story that decades later can still be acutely felt." Publisher's Weekly

"This terse, tense, tough novel is absolutely riveting...Every rose petal, drop of blood and splatter of brain, every movement and comment resonates with history as if trapped within a claustrophobic nightmare. Braver keeps this solemn and somber tone throughout, his brisk, often lyrical declarative sentences as direct and translucent as the characters are unable to be."Sam Coale, The Providence Journal

Braver is a terrific writer, an observer of the most acute details; throughout the book, he traces the subtle interactions of his characters as they collide and move apart. One of the most moving interactions here takes place between Jackie and an ambulance driver named Al Rike as they share cigarettes outside the trauma room where her husband's body lies...in this tiny glimmer of connection, whole universes of emotion are uncovered.”David Ulin, Los Angeles Times Book Review

"This is fiction of course, but it has the ring of truth...And it is both painful and fascinating, like rubbernecking at an accident, to watch. With an audacity of confidence and a sure sense of fiction's ability to tell eternal truths better than history, Braver re-creates the day the world changed." Jay Strafford, Richmond Times-Dispatch

"Beautifully written, November 22, 1963 blurs the line between novel and journalism into something more powerful than eithera visceral story of an unthinkable event that continues to touch millions, 45 years later."Michael E. Young, The Dallas Morning News

"Adam Braver's November 22, 1963 focuses on the singular event of President Kennedy's assassination, fusing fiction and fact from eyewitnesses and other sources to make for a blazingly original, brilliantly concretized historical novelfrom the author of Mr. Lincoln's War."ELLE

Braver has achieved more than a skillful retelling of a particularly morbid moment in American history. With its collage-like structure and postmodern blend of fact and fiction, November 22, 1963 raises fascinating questions about how we perceive history and the ways in which personal and collective experience intersect.”Alexis Nelson, The Oregonian

"A literary piece that blends fact and fiction, making protagonists of real people and asking very deep questions about the history, nostalgia and loss."Kel Munger, Sacramento News & Review

"You would think that by now every and any thing that could have been written about the murder of the president has been said a dozen times over...Yet this outstanding piece of non-fiction fiction from Adam Braver manages to do so, and thus makes the book very much worth the time and money to buy and read." Neil Flowers, Feminist Review

"Braver’s use of multiple viewpoints, engaging personal insight, and short blocks of prose propel readers through this impressive example of historical fiction."Library Journal

"Adam Braver has done something that might have seemed impossible not long agohe's created a fresh look at the events of November 22, 1963...Braver has found a way to once again dip into this event that shattered a nation, and reminds us of how devastating a day it was without simply re-hashing what others have written before. It's a bold task for a writer, begin to write about something that every reader picking the ball up already thinks they know the ending to, but Braver was more than up to the task."Dan Wickett, Emerging Writers Network

"This is historical fiction at its best: intensely researched and beautifully written."Erika D., Book Bargain Reviews

"One may feel drawn into the experience of various characters, while simultaneously treading above some darker, plunging depth. At other moments, there is only the residue of memory, the granite presence of fact...[Braver] writes with the seductive concision of an alternate commission, a tautness that gives authority to speculation and authenticity to the emotional valences, retrained as they are."  Ron Slate, On the Seawall

"The successes of November 22, 1963 lie in Braver’s ability to gently and respectfully reside, like a professional surgeon might, in the stomachs and minds of the people who lived through that day...Halfway through November 22, 1963, you realize the novel is somehow not about JFK at all, but about us. A lesser writer would have failed at piecing this story together in such a way that we are okay reliving that monumentally awful day, but in Braver’s hands, we come back to the present wiser versions of ourselves, if also a bit sadder." PDX Writer Daily

"Braver’s novel shows what can be done when a writer delves deeply into the textures and facts of a historical event about which we thought we knew everything. Of course we did not; we never know everything. His curiosity and reconstruction brings to life the human drama in a way that Oliver Stone and a roomful of conspiracy buffs never could. Yet the conspiracy buffs get all the press. Braver’s novel deserves a bigger share."Don Graham, Texas Observer

"Spellbinding...a mesmerizing tidal wave of facts, portraits, episodes, and stories...It's a memorable novel about a day the nation would like to forget and needs to remember."Barbara Ardinger, ForeWord Magazine

"Adam Braver has crafted a fantastic novel weaving real events with careful fiction, sweeping us back to Dallas on the day of the JFK assassination." Elizabeth Lopeman, Eugene Magazine

"[Braver] doesn't overreach. Instead, he recounts that horrible day in November with no small measure of empathy, 'obliterating a moment' in his own words and taking it back to a place 'where even in violence the world seemed a little softer.'"the San Diego Union-Tribune

"...Braver shows himself to be a writer of acute judgment and talent. The degree of attention paid by the author to the micro-level of history lends his novel a humanity and perspective that had, I feared, been drained from popular representations of the assassination." Karl Whitney, 3:AM Magazine

More About the Author

Adam Braver is the author of five novels (MR. LINCOLN'S WARS, DIVINE SARAH, CROWS OVER THE WHEATFIELD, NOVEMBER 22, 1963, and MISFIT). His books have been selected for the Barnes and Noble Discover New Writers program, Borders' Original Voices series, the IndieNext list, and twice for the Book Sense list, as well as having been translated into Italian, Japanese, Portuguese, and French. Braver's fiction and essays have appeared in journals such as Daedalus, Ontario Review, Cimarron Review, Water-Stone Review, Harvard Review, Tin House, The Normal School, West Branch, The Pinch, and Post Road. He is on faculty and writer-in-residence at Roger Williams University in Bristol, RI. He also works regularly at the New York State Summer Writers Institute.

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

According to the Historical Novel Society, "To be deemed historical...a novel must have been written at least fifty years after the events described, or have been written by someone who was not alive at the time of those events (who therefore approaches them only by research)." Author Adam Braver may have been alive when President John F. Kennedy was assassinated: Braver was born in 1963. But he obviously does not remember the event, and he has approached it through a fascinating combination of research and fiction-crafting in his new novel.

I thought I knew a lot about the assassination, which is an historical event for me, too (my parents were still a few months away from meeting each other on November 22, 1963). But Braver's book, which focuses in depth on the events of that day through the closely-drawn third-person eyes of everyone from a Dallas policeman to Abe Zapruder to Maud Shaw (Caroline and John-John's nanny) to, of course, Jackie Kennedy, opened up so much more.

Most of us will never know what it was to be Air Force One as it bore the slain President's coffin back to Washington; Braver has imagined that. Most of us didn't witness the autopsy at Walter Reed; Braver has evoked it. Most of us can't imagine how Maud Shaw told six-year-old Caroline what had happened (I hadn't even realized that Jackie Kennedy had given the nanny that awful task); Braver shows us how it might have happened:

I recently returned from a trip to Dallas over the new year. I did take in the JFK sites and did it as a history buff and not as a tourist. This book is a mix of fiction and history and it truly will catch you from the first chapter. I love the story telling angle. I feel that Braver captures Jackie Kennedy's raw emotions and amazing strength in the face of a horrific nightmare. I find that I cannot put this book down and I love it!

This novel by Adam Braver defies typical narrative writing. He takes the singular moment of the tragedy of the Kennedy assassination and makes it personal. Jackie Kennedy's face on the front cover of the book tells it all: the indefinable sadness and grief combined with her distinct beauty, grace, and courage. It was Jackie who made our nation continue, not LBJ. Really makes you want to cry and be proud to be an American. No conspiracy theories, no dwelling on what might have been. There is no delusion that we were once an innocent nation. Braver has written something so pure and powerful, so compact. It is one of the best books of the year.

Adam Braver set himself a difficult task in his newest novel, November 22, 1963, by attempting to take the Kennedy assassination--one of the most talked about and discussed events of the twentieth century--and make it fresh again. One of the ways he does this is to stay away from Kennedy himself, as well as Lee Harvey Oswald, and to instead focus much of the book on Jackie Kennedy and the other, often more ordinary people affected by the events of the day. He doesn't ignore the social or political implications of the assassination, but he does rightly push them aside in favor of focusing on his characters and their actions rather than the ideological meanings behind them.

Braver's depiction of Jackie Kennedy is of a strong, deeply sad woman still reeling from the death of her youngest son and stunned by the events of her husband's death. In one of the most affecting passages from the early chapters of the novel, Jackie, sitting alone with the president's body while in flight back to Washington, senses a warmth coming from within the casket, taking her back to the hospital where he was pronounced dead:

"Jack's foot had still felt warm when she kissed it. That had been in the emergency room at Parkland, and he had been covered by a sheet that was thick and bulky at the top, from where his head was still wrapped in layers of other sheets. Had he been given last rites? Jackie wanted to know. The priest told her conditional rites. There was finality to his voice when he said that. It trembled in his throat. That was when Jackie took off her ring. She turned to leave the room, feeling neither brave, nor proud, nor resigned. She ran her empty finger along the edge of the gurney. The metal, cold and detached, cut a straight line through the stillness of the room.Read more ›